What safety measures will be in place on first day of school in Seattle?

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What safety measures will be in place when Seattle students show up to school Wednesday?

Will there be police officers on campus? Extra security staff? Will high school students be permitted to leave campus for lunch? 

We answer some of the questions parents may have as they prepare for the 2024-25 school year. 

Will there be extra security staff? 

Yes. 

Seattle Public Schools contracted with a security firm to hire 16 security staff, who will be in place on the first day of classes. One guard will be assigned to each comprehensive high school and two at five focus high schools: Franklin, Rainier Beach, Chief Sealth, Ingraham and Garfield. 

The contract staff will be stationed outside the schools. 

The district is also hiring 15 new safety and security specialists, increasing the number of people in those roles to 60. High schools generally have two specialists. The five focus high schools will get two more, for a total of four at each building.  

All specialists may not be in place on the first day. 

The specialists will not carry firearms, and they will be trained in de-escalation techniques, said Fred Podesta, SPS’ chief operations officer. They’ll focus on building relationships with students, managing student behavior, defusing tense situations and keeping intruders off campus. They’ll patrol the buildings and monitor lunch and class transition times. 

In hiring, the district typically looks for individuals who have worked in schools, such as instructional assistants or as coaches, or have experience working with children, Podesta said.

The district also plans to hire a new executive director to oversee safety and security. It is currently interviewing candidates.  

Parents and students will notice extra signs warning that schools are firearm-free zones and that there’s video surveillance in some high schools and middle schools. 

What’s happening with school resource officers or police officers on campuses? 

The district and the Seattle Police Department are still discussing what role police officers will have on campuses. When the school year starts, no police officers will be assigned to work inside schools. 

There will be extra police on patrol outside of the high schools, during lunch and before and after school.  

At Garfield, a police officer will be stationed at the nearby Teen Life Center and will be available to help on the campus.

There has been heightened concern about campus safety after Amarr Murphy-Paine, 17, a Garfield student, was shot and killed in the school’s parking lot in June. As of Friday, no arrests had been made in connection to Murphy-Paine’s death. Another student was shot and injured at a bus stop near campus in March. 

The consistency and frequency of police presence at other schools will vary “as resources allow,” said Kerry Keefe, director of program development with the Seattle Police Department. 

District staff could submit a proposal about police presence on campus to Superintendent Brent Jones before the end of October. Podesta said officers could possibly serve as school liaisons, with the focus on building relationships with students. 

School leaders and school communities will be consulted before a decision is made, he said.  

Seattle Public Schools stopped using armed police officers at five campuses in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, as did a number of districts around the country. In Seattle, Black students were disproportionately referred to the police relative to their enrollment.

But with fatal shootings in and around Seattle schools, including at Ingraham in 2022, near Chief Sealth in January and at Garfield in June, some parents and school community members have expressed interest in having police, in some form, on high school campuses.  

Mayor Bruce Harrell announced $5.6 million to hire more mental health counselors and care coordinators. When will students see the impact? 

Not on the first day. However, some of the new mental health therapists could start work this fall. 

Public Health – Seattle & King County, which is managing the funds, said school-based health centers at 21 schools that are the focus of recent initiatives to prevent youth violence will receive funding this month.   

The money will pay for 21 new mental health therapists and 21 mental health care coordinators to help diagnose and treat more students.

Last school year, 21 school-based health centers provided mental health therapy for about 1,072 middle and high school students, according to the agency.

Officials with Public Health hope the money will help double the number of students served. 

How fast students can receive those benefits depends on how quickly the centers can hire and train new workers, according to Public Health. 

Students who need help at the beginning of the year can enroll at one of the centers. 

Public Health plans to seek requests for proposals from community organizations to fill the care coordinator roles. The agency hopes to fill those positions by spring 2025. 

The district once floated ID badges, clear backpacks and barring off-campus lunches. What’s the status? 

There will be no across-the-board ID requirement for high school students this fall. No clear backpacks. No districtwide ban on leaving campus at lunch time.

Three high schools — Rainier Beach, Nathan Hale and Alan T. Sugiyama — will “field-test” restricting off-campus lunch for some students. 

The district shelved a proposal to bar high schoolers from leaving campus during lunch, citing, for example, questions about whether all its high schools had capacity to serve lunch to all students. Officials also were unsure how families and students felt about such a big change.   

After the Garfield shooting, the district barred students from leaving campus for lunch.

Similarly, there were also lots of questions about an ID requirement and clear backpacks. Who would authenticate the IDs? What happens if they got lost? What role would teachers play?

The district did not have answers for those questions and decided not to pursue the ID requirement systemwide.

Regarding clear backpacks, Podesta and Bev Redmond, Seattle Public Schools’ chief of staff and spokesperson, said there were questions about their effectiveness — there are still many places to hide things inside a clear backpack — and parents would have had a small window during which to buy the backpacks if the district required them. 

The district said it would continue to research how clear backpacks have worked in other school districts.

Correction: A police officer murdered George Floyd in May 2020. His manner of death was reported incorrectly in an earlier version of this story.

Correction: Due to incorrect information provided to The Seattle Times, the number of Seattle Public Schools students who were provided mental therapy at 21 school-based health centers was reported incorrectly in an earlier version of this story.